Contents

History

Ask.com was originally known as Ask Jeeves, where "Jeeves" is the name of the "gentleman's personal gentleman", or valet, fetching answers to any question asked. The character was based on Jeeves, Bertie Wooster's fictional valet from the works of P. G. Wodehouse.

The original idea behind Ask Jeeves was to allow users to get answers to questions posed in everyday, natural language, as well as traditional keyword searching. The current Ask.com still supports this, with added support for math, dictionary, and conversion questions.

In 2005, the company announced plans to phase out Jeeves. On February 27, 2006, the character disappeared from Ask.com, and was stated to be "going in to retirement." The website prominently brought the character back in 2009.

On May 16, 2006, Ask implemented a "Binoculars Site Preview" into its search results. On search results pages, the "Binoculars" let searchers capture a sneak peak of the page they could visit with a mouse-over activating screenshot pop-up.[5]

On April 20, 2009, the "Jeeves" character re-appeared on ask.com, standing on the left side of the page. His name, however, is still not mentioned. ask.co.uk still calls itself "Ask Jeeves", featuring the same character.

Corporate details

Ask Jeeves, Inc. stock traded on the NASDAQ stock exchange from July 1999 to July 2005, under the ticker symbol ASKJ. In July 2005, the ASKJ ticker was retired upon the acquisition by InterActiveCorp, valuing ASKJ at $1.85 billion.

Ask Sponsored Listings

Ask Sponsored Listings is the search engine marketing tool offered to advertisers to increase the visibility of their websites (and subsequent businesses, services, and products) by producing more prominent and frequent search engine listing results.

Marketing and promotion

Information-revolution.org campaign

In early 2007, a number of advertisements appeared on London Underground trains warning commuters that 75% of all the information on the web flowed through one site (implied to be Google), with a URL for www.information-revolution.org.[11]

NASCAR sponsorship

On January 14, 2009, Ask.com became the official sponsor of NASCAR driver Bobby Labonte's #96 car. Ask would become the official search engine of NASCAR.[13] Ask.com will be the primary sponsor for the No. 96 for 18 of the first 21 races and has rights to increase this to a total of 29 races this season.[14] The Ask.com car debuted in the 2009 Bud Shootout where it failed to finish the race but subsequently has come back strong placing as high as 5th in the March 1st, 2009 Shelby 427 race at Las Vegas Motor Speedway.[15] Ask.com's foray into NASCAR is the first instance of its venture into what it calls Super Verticals.[16]

Toolbar

Features include the web, image, news, dictionary searches, the ability to save and share web pages and images through MyStuff, personalizable news feeds ranging from local to international, weather forecasts, stock portfolios, maps, and related services.

The Ask.com toolbar can be installed from the toolbar.ask.com website. Some other programs can also install the toolbar. The user can uncheck a box during the installation of the original program if the user does not want the toolbar installed.

The Ask toolbar can be uninstalled from Internet Explorer through the Windows control panel, and from Firefox through the Add-ons menu. Software which changes the browser behaviour may still remain on the computer after the uninstall of the toolbar, requiring further uninstalls or file deletions.[17] The Ask.com toolbar is incompatible with Kaspersky Internet Security; presence of the toolbar causes license key corruption.[18]